


getting out of here alive

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Category: Constantine (2005), Hellblazer & Related Fandoms, Hellboy (Movies), Hellboy - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Male Friendship, Post-Canon, Post-Constantine, Post-Hellboy, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, but I did come out of writing this shipping it pretty hard so if you'd prefer that, now see I said that and I wrote this in the best of good faith, you're in good company
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 20:00:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15758673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: “Lung cancer,” Hellboy said to the rosary in his fist.  “All that shit he survived, Nazis and monsters and—goddamn, me, and he was gonna die from lung cancer.  He never even smoked.”“Fuck,” John said with feeling.  “I’m—fuck me, Red.  I’m so sorry.”John goes to find an old friend, after he gets word of a small disaster in Moscow that almost ended the world.





	getting out of here alive

**Author's Note:**

> I got a couple asks holding me accountable to my tags on [this post,](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/post/176647459595/galwednesday-generationintrovert-be-kind) so here we all are. The title is from that quote in the post, by Keanu Reeves. I guess there's nothing _stopping_ you from picturing comic-verse Constantine, or Matt Ryan from the TV series, but it's specifically referencing the 2005 movie because, obviously, the quote that prompted this was by Reeves. And, of course, my general respect for canon timelines here is...slim to none.

John shrugged deeper into his long coat—New Jersey wasn’t cold, not really, but it was damp at night, and he missed Los Angeles with its perpetual warmth.  This clammy chill gnawed sullenly at his bones, and the concrete step was cold under his knee as he knelt beside the door.  He swore under his breath and gave his tension wrench a frustrated twist, and—there.  The lock gave, and he pocketed his lockpicks as he stood, pulling his coat around him and scowling as he slipped through the door.

The side door opened into a small office, papered with drawings by a small child’s hand, dark and quiet.  Well, it was past midnight on a November Tuesday, hardly peak work hours.  The door on the other side of the office was propped open, and John shoved both hands deep into his pockets and walked as quietly as he could over the tile and into the narthex.  He paused there, beside the font.

Saint Benedict’s was a small church, neither well-attended nor well-appointed, but the stained glass over the altar was pristine, blue and clouded white wreathed in red and gold.  The colors were dim at night, only visible as shifting glints when the clouds parted to let the moonlight through.  The lights in the sanctuary were still off, impenetrable shadows cluttering in the corners where the faint glow from outside couldn’t reach.

John patted the edge of the holy water font, like someone dismissing a suspicious cat, before he walked into the sanctuary, toward the figure in the fourth row.

“Hey, Johnny,” the figure said as John sat down.  He tipped his head to the side, glancing at John out of the corner of one eye, his left hand resting on the back of the next pew up, the beads of a rosary between his fingers so that the cross draped over the curve of his thumb.  His right hand was propped on his knees, graphite-grey in the light and scrawled with shadows that seemed to writhe.  “Been down to Georgia lately?”

“Still not a good joke, Red,” John said dryly.  “How’s Moscow?”

“Hm,” Hellboy said.  His voice was the same subterranean rumble it had been last time John saw him, the same it had been when John was twenty-five and so determined to get into trouble that he almost got killed in Atlanta.  Hellboy wasn’t quite static, not like Gabriel, he was just…slow to change.  He looked older than he did twenty years ago, but only barely.  It was probably even the same coat he’d been wearing then, meticulously repaired.  “Moscow’s fine.  Cold and wet.  Heard about that, huh?”

“Heard about that,” John confirmed.  “I was in the area, thought I’d come say hi.”

“Sure you were.”

John shrugged.  “Glad to see you’re feeling yourself, is all.”

Hellboy’s teeth flashed for a brief moment in the moonlight.  “You weren’t this diplomatic last time.”

“Last time I was about three days post-mortem, and in a real rush to get that spear off my hands.”  John patted absently at his coat pockets, wishing he had a cigarette, and came up with a lighter instead.  He flicked it open, then closed, and watched the eyeshine that flashed back from Hellboy’s gaze in the short-lived flame.  “Really though,” he said.  “Shook us up pretty good, seeing that end days shit pop up and then go away like that.  You should be glad I got here first.  Everyone else is sprinting off to Moscow, or else building bunkers.”

“Always glad to see you,” Hellboy drawled, and his teeth flashed again in the flicker of John’s lighter, open-close.  “Sorry for the scare.”

“I was thinking you’d finally managed to get that big head of yours bashed in.  Figures that you managed to just civilly turn down the Apocalypse, though, you always were a stubborn fuck.  You know how hard us mere mortals have to work to shut down that kind of shit?”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”  John sighed, flipping his lighter thoughtfully over his knuckles.  “Your involvement isn’t exactly common knowledge, Red, but seriously.  How are you doing?”

Hellboy waved his right hand dismissively, still passing the rosary through his left one bead at a time.  The silken wooden beads glowed when John’s lighter flicked on.  “Good learning experience, to the tune of watching my step.”

“Mmhm,” John murmured, and dropped the subject.  “I heard about your old man, too.”

“Yeah,” Hellboy said quietly.  His lips twisted.  “You wanna hear a good joke, Johnny?”  He didn’t wait for an answer before he continued, a deft flip of his hand switching the cross onto the front of his knuckles, where it dangled loose.  “He’d have died of lung cancer if that puppet fuck hadn’t murdered him.”

John—winced.

It had been a long time since John winced.

“Jesus, Hellboy.  I’m sorry.”

“He kept it a secret,” Hellboy went on, with a fatalistic note in his voice.  “Because he didn’t want to worry me, see.  Because I’m going to live a long, long time, and he wanted me not to worry over him until I didn’t have a choice.  But after--”  Hellboy hesitated.  “His will ain’t exactly a long one.  All finances to support the Bureau, on the condition that I always have a place here.  All books to remain in the library, under the care of Abraham Sapien.  All personal effects to his son, and please could I make sure his headstone says something nice.  I got his medical records, too.”

Hellboy’s hand dropped from the back of the pew and he propped both elbows on his knees, his head bowing down as if in prayer as he shook it slowly.  John nodded in the dark—Hellboy’s night vision was some of the best he’d ever encountered, he would see it—and tried not to give in to the sudden black swell of rage under his ribs.

“Lung cancer,” Hellboy said to the rosary in his fist.  “All that shit he survived, Nazis and monsters and—goddamn, me, and he was gonna die from lung cancer.  He never even smoked.”

“Fuck,” John said with feeling.  “I’m—fuck me, Red.  I’m so sorry.”

It wasn’t fair.  John had met Doctor Trevor Bruttenholm once and only once, delivering the Spear of Destiny into the care of the BPRD.  He and Hellboy had been on good terms, at the time, and it had been almost funny, watching the hulking red demon with his broad military-brat drawl and the sophisticated old man with his cane and his stern eyes.  They looked nothing alike, their mannerisms were like night and day, but—Hellboy always lingered by his father’s chair when he was rising, waiting to offer his hand to help him up, and Doctor Bruttenholm kept a stock of chocolates in his desk to toss to his son. 

The professor had been a good man, was the thing.  Really a good man, the kind of man who decided to raise a demonic child as his own son, the kind of man who heard out John’s story about his acquisition of the Spear with calm interest and then offered him coffee, the kind of man who gave a shit.

The kind of man who deserved to be saved from an unfair death he hadn’t earned.

What must it be like, John wondered, to sit next to a man who half-cheated his way into the miracle Hellboy must still crave for his father?

John flicked his lighter, open-close, and wondered if he should leave.  The silence dragged on like tar, heavy and dense, the only sound the rapid click-click of the lighter and the slow, swelling tide of Hellboy’s breathing.

It was almost five minutes later when Hellboy broke the silence with the inevitable question.

“How’d you do it, Constantine?”

John let out the breath he had been holding.  Hellboy never called him by his last name.  “I don’t--”

Hellboy shook his head.  “No, I—I know you told us the Devil saved your life.  But how’d you do it, really?  A bargain?  Pentacostal silver?  Shit, did Old Scratch just let you walk the hell out?  Too obnoxious to put up with?”

“Pentacostal silver?” John asked quietly.  “Been doing some reading on how to get out of Hell?”

“It’s my job.”  Hellboy paused.  “And—no.  I’m not planning to try anything.  He’d never forgive me.  I just want to know.”

“I handed Mammon in to Lucifer,” John said flatly.  “He offered me a reward—an extension on my life, more time to buy a ticket to Heaven.  So I--”  He broke off and sighed, turning his lighter over in his fingers.

“So you took it,” Hellboy finished.

John’s lips quirked into a rueful smile, and shook his head.  “Actually, no.  I—there was this girl--”

“Always a girl.”

“Fuck you, you can’t lecture me,” John said, good-natured.  “There was this girl, a psychic.  She saw what was coming, so she--” the good humor faded and John cleared his throat.  “So she jumped off a roof and left her sister a message for me.  She saved the world, y’know, and she was damned forever—suicide.”

“Ah,” Hellboy murmured.  “I gotcha.  Save the girl.”

John nodded.  “And—sacrifice, the old rules and all that shit.  The Devil’s a sore fucking loser.”

“So here you are,” Hellboy said.

“Here I am,” John agreed.  He hesitated, flicked the lighter.  “Your old man—the professor couldn’t have pulled that cheat,” he said quietly.  “Hell was never getting its hands on him.”

“Yeah.”  Hellboy let the rosary slip through his fingers, one bead at a time, until he had the cross in his fingers, rubbing the smooth wood thoughtfully with his thumb.  “Yeah, you’re right.”

They subsided back into silence, thick and cloying.  John turned his lighter over in his fingers, the quiet sound of his skin brushing the metal loud in the quiet sanctuary, and Hellboy’s eyes with their faint shine of reflected moonlight fixed on the dim glint of silver.  

“The priest here knows me,” Hellboy said abruptly, and John blinked in surprise but didn’t fumble his lighter.  “Closest parish to our base, so this priest I knew what I was a kid—really a kid, three or four—pulled some strings to get one of his friends he trusted placed here and then they made him sign about a thousand NDA’s.  He gave me a spare key, so I could come in at night when I wanted to.  Good guy, Father Wesley.”

“Sounds—level-headed,” John remarked.

Hellboy chuckled, a little wry.  “More’n some, I bet.  So how’d you get in here, Johnny?”

“Picked the lock.”

“You just picked locks until you found me?”

“No, I asked Liz,” John said with a shrug.  “She gave me a few places to try, but--”  John cracked a smile, flicked his lighter.  Open-close, open-close, and eyeshine.  “I’ve known you since I was twenty-five, Red, I tried the church first.”

“Fair enough,” Hellboy said.  He unwound the rosary from his fingers and palmed it in his stone hand, and then held out his other hand to John.  “Gimme that thing, you’re gonna give me a migraine.”

John flicked the lighter on vengefully, and the light from the tiny flame glowed bright in the dark room, turning Hellboy’s hand from grey to brilliant red and throwing a shadow across a scar marring the meat of his palm.

“I thought you were fireproof, you smug son of a bitch,” John said, closing the lighter and tossing it blindly across the space between them.  Hellboy caught it and opened it, setting it carefully on the pew in front of him so that the flame glowed against the dark.  “Thanks,” John added dryly.

“Spend all my time with people who can’t see fuck-all,” Hellboy said.  He opened his flesh and blood hand, palm up, so that the light fell on the fresh scar—a cross, John realized.  It was a small thing, not even two inches tall, squared off on the ends, with the distinctive shiny look of a burn scar recently healed over, and it must have been a deep burn, because it resisted stretching when Hellboy spread his hand for John to see. 

“Damn,” John said, almost awed against his will—it was more impressive, somehow, to see scars on Hellboy’s pristine red skin than on his own.  Hellboy wasn’t invulnerable, for all that he was sturdier than most people, but he never scarred.  Except for the deep-scored coils creeping up his arm from the stone hand, Hellboy didn’t have a mark on him.

But now he did.

“The rosary,” Hellboy said, brushing his palm with the tip of one stone finger.  “Meyers—you might have met Meyers, he’s a Boy Scout, you’ll hate him—he threw it to me.  Wanted me to remember…a lot of shit.”

John normally prided himself on his poker face, but he felt his eyebrows jump at that.  “The cross on your rosary did that?”

“Father’s rosary,” Hellboy corrected.  “And—yeah.”  He touched the scar again, apparently fascinated, mouth set and grim.  “Holy stuff never burned me before.”

“Yeah, I know,” John said.  “I dumped holy water on you once.”

“Thanks, Johnny,” Hellboy said.  Watching him roll his eyes in the small flame of the lighter was strange—two shining gold coins set deep into his face.  “But while I was—out of it.  I caught the rosary and it hurt.”  He sounded offended, almost like a kid who’d just discovered pain, and John wondered, again, just how old Hellboy was by the reckoning of whatever, exactly, his species was called.  When John was twenty-five and stupid, Hellboy had seemed older and experienced in a way that John, mortal as he was, couldn’t hope to match.  Now, John was forty-five, and Hellboy seemed still young and wide-eyed and ready to get into trouble.

John had never been good with kids.  He’d always been pretty good with Hellboy, though, so he kept his voice absent and considering when he spoke again.  “Out of it like what?”

“Hm,” Hellboy rumbled.  “Out of it like you don’t wanna see.  Full demon.”  He reached out and held his flesh and blood hand over the flame, so that the gold licked along the crease of his palm and clung to his skin like honey, or holy oil.  “Learned my real name.  Don’t like it much.”

“What is it?”

Hellboy shook his head, lingering over the fire and turning his hand to watch the small tongue of flame coil around his fingertips.  It took a long moment before he spoke again.  “Father would be so disappointed in me.”  He shook his head.  “I could have destroyed…everything, Johnny.  He would have been so disappointed.”

“You didn’t, though,” John said, stretching both legs out in front of him.  “I could have fucked the world up pretty good too, in my time, and I didn’t.”

Hellboy smiled, and in the light of the single small flame it looked terrifying, his teeth and eyes flashing, the harsh craggy lines of his face throwing shadows darker than ink over the gold- and silver-touched red of his skin.  “Don’t tell me you don’t feel guilty, Johnny.”

“I do,” John agreed. 

“So,” Hellboy said.  “Share your worldly wisdom.”

John considered, watching the delicate flame part around Hellboy’s palm, below the burn, and the shadows that shifted slow and sleepy on the ceiling, cast by his hand.  “I think,” John said, “that good people don’t turn down the Apocalypse because they like humanity too much to destroy it.”

Hellboy chuckled, pulling his hand back.  “And what’s that say about you?”

“That I’ve put a lot of damn work into this planet and I’m not about to watch some smug fucking archdemon turn it into an ashtray,” John said flatly, and Hellboy threw his head back and laughed properly, deep and ringing as a bell.  John let one corner of his mouth tick up at the sound.  For all that Hellboy looked out of place in a church, with his blunted red horns and inhuman yellow eyes, his laugh lived in the vaults of the roof and the recessed windows like he was born there.

“That’s why Father liked you,” Hellboy said, still snickering to himself.  “Said you were direct.”

John shrugged, reaching out to flick his lighter closed and palm it.  “He was a good man.  Not many of those around in the world.”  He stood, pocketed the lighter.  The church was darker than before, without it, the dim moonlight shining through the stained glass not quite enough for his eyes anymore, but Hellboy was still unmistakable, cast in shades of grey.  Red turned grey faster than any other color on the spectrum, in low light—Hellboy had told him that fact the first time John accused him of being less subtle than a fire engine.  Then he’d followed it up with a smirk and “besides, they don’t bring me places to be subtle,” and, in fairness, John could hardly question that one.

“Not many,” Hellboy agreed, his smile fading a little.

“Good thing your father raised one,” John added, and clapped Hellboy on the shoulder as he left the pew without looking back to see his face.  “Come on, Red.  Liz said to bring you back in time for poker.”

There was a moment of quiet, and John walked up the aisle with his hands in his pockets without pausing.  Then Hellboy sighed and rose to his feet, his steps heavy on the floor as he followed John outside, and he was chuckling again when he caught up.

“I don’t want to take all your money, Johnny,” Hellboy said.

John grinned, idly missing a cigarette as he pushed open the church doors and stepped out into the clammy night air again.  “You’ve got a shit poker face.”

“Yeah, and you’re a fuckin’ cheat,” Hellboy said comfortably, pausing to lock the doors behind him.  “We play poker with a ref.  Blue’s gonna close you down the second you start, so enjoy it while it lasts and all that.”

“I’m not a cheat.  I’m just better than you.”

Hellboy scoffed, and when they started walking, he hummed under his breath to the old song. 

_…a fiddle of gold against your soul_ …

“I’ll _give_ you my money to cut that shit out right now,” John said.

Hellboy switched to whistling.

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway, I got about 2k through writing this fic and realized, with a sort of grim resignation, that now I really like the idea of John and Hellboy having kind of a weird, couple-decade-long romance, starting with the first time they met in Georgia when John was 25 and they fucked in a motel saferoom, up through this fic twenty years later, and so on and so forth. It's nothing but fucking Devil Went Down to Georgia references. So. That's what I'm about now.
> 
> I have [a Tumblr](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/), if you want to talk to me about this ship I pulled out of the ether and have no canonical support for.


End file.
